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Sentiment for/against GitHub aside... "Why X are doing Y" articles like these pretend that the premise of "X are doing Y" is true, conveniently skipping to the
by jorisw 3mo ago
Sentiment for/against GitHub aside...
"Why X are doing Y" articles like these pretend that the premise of "X are doing Y" is true, conveniently skipping to the "Why" before proving that the premise is even accurate in any meaningful way.
This is why I never buy headlines that start out with "Why".
> developers are ditching
Proceeds to list but a handful of remotely meaningful repos against the hundreds of thousands on there
- illliillll 3mo ago[dead]
- pjc50 3mo agoYou can just insert the word "some" as required.
- jorisw 3mo agoAgreed, but the headline wouldn't travel nearly as well, if at all. > Why some Americans are switching to soy Would be more accurate than > Why Americans are switching to soy But wouldn't garner nearly the same amount of clicks. There is conscious exaggeration in omitting 'some' - a fluff-blog click-farm trope I don't enjoy seeing in the developer space.
- pfisherman 3mo agoYou could drop the verb clause? This would make the headline accurate while keeping it punchy. > why Americans switch to soy And > why developers switch to codeberg But the cynic in me thinks that the form of the headline that drastically overstates the the phenomenon in question by implication is something that has been workshopped and is commonly used because it turns something kind of boring into a spectacle.
- gbacon 3mo agoSome means at least one.
- close04 3mo ago> a handful of remotely meaningful repos If there's a trend to leave a platform it won't start with the most entrenched users (largest repos). They acknowledge your concern in the article and their analysis does apply to those few who are leaving. But to be fair the title can be interpreted either way and the most reasonable read for anyone is "some of them are leaving". I'd find it clickbaity if they said "why developers are leaving en-masse" and then point out to the regular turnover. There's clearly a trend, what's not clear is if it gains momentum.
- esperent 3mo ago> If there's a trend That's the point being made. Is there a trend? How do we know? There's always some repos moving between hosting providers for all kinds of reasons. The burden of proof is on the author here to show there's been an increase and they don't do that.
- conartist6 3mo agoThe early adopters are leaving. These are the people that will blaze a trail that others follow.
- jorisw 3mo agoYou could say that any time two distant psychos roll their Teslas off a rocky cliff and then exclaim "Why Tesla drivers are dumping their cars". And not provide any other meaningful data
- conartist6 3mo agoRolling your car off a cliff isn't the same thing. This would be more like you want to drive your Tesla into the jungle so you build a road as you go. The key problem is not losing the cars but losing the road builders who are now no longer building roads that lead to you, but rather roads that lead away
- esperent 3mo ago
- p-e-w 3mo agoI’ve seen titles like “Why top scientists are leaving the United States” where the article itself talked about A SINGLE RESEARCHER relocating to France.
- embedding-shape 3mo agoIf you're talking about the article featured on HN just day(s) ago, that was about a funding effort to get more researchers to move to France from the US, while they interviewed one specific individual. I think maybe you skipped the contents of that article (as it was in French) and instead just read the HN comments which misunderstood the article :)
- p-e-w 3mo ago> If you're talking about the article featured on HN just day(s) ago I’m not.
- embedding-shape 3mo agoEngaging :) Are you perhaps talking about "Top researchers leave USA for the Netherlands" then that was also on the HN frontpage just days ago? There been so many articles, surveys and papers about how scientists and researchers are leaving the US for the last 1-2 years, that it's hard to keep track. Still, I'm curious to understand what you actually read.
- p-e-w 3mo agoNo, I’m talking about an article I saw maybe 10-12 months ago on a major news site, perhaps The Guardian. Individual reports of scientists leaving are meaningless without overall statistics. If there is a net outflow of scientists from the US, I’m not aware of it, and I certainly haven’t seen any actual statistical evidence for it.
- juanibiapina 3mo agoAgreed. But if I comment on this, I'm promoting the article. What do I do?
- stymaar 3mo ago> Proceeds to list but a handful of remotely meaningful repos against the hundreds of thousands on there The trend is what's interesting here. Github has never been threatened by anyone, because their service was too good to bother for everyone but the most ideologically motivated. Now their service has become so bad there's a github joke at work every time something is down or slower than it should. Reputation is a very valuable thing, and Github has destroyed a stellar one in a few month, this is newsworthy.
- jorisw 3mo agoExcept the article doesn't prove any trend
- ablob 3mo agoThe existence and growth of the codeberg project does, however.
- jorisw 3mo agoAnd what level of 'growth' constitutes a trend that warrants "developers are ditching GitHub" without providing any numbers at all?
- oblio 3mo agoThe existence of Telegram doesn't negate the fact that WhatsApp is the world's most popular instant messaging platform, and the others aren't even close. And Telegram is a lot more developed and has a much larger percentage of the global instant messenger marketshare, compared to Github vs CodeBerg.
- embedding-shape 3mo agoHere you have (albeit small) proof of some sort of trend: https://trends.google.com/explore?q=codeberg%2Cforgejo%2Cgitea%2Cgithub%2520alternatives&date=all&geo=Worldwide https://trends.google.com/explore?q=codeberg%2Cforgejo%2Cgit... Still, doesn't come close to popularity of GitHub itself today (https://trends.google.com/explore?q=codeberg%2Cforgejo%2Cgitea%2Cgitlab%2Cgithub&date=all&geo=Worldwide https://trends.google.com/explore?q=codeberg%2Cforgejo%2Cgit...), but I think the trend of moving away from GitHub is clear both in data and sentiment, both qualitative and quantitative.
- karel-3d 3mo agohowtogeek is low-effort content mill, it's just upvoted here because of the headline, there is 0 actual effort in the article
- gortok 3mo agoI don’t know if it’s because of the weasel words in the article or the extensive use of passive voice in the article, but this article feels in part like it’s AI generated. I am exhausted with having to figure out whether someone wrote something or let AI generate it for them. Reading articles like this has become less pleasurable since the advent of generative AI. There’s no feeling or heart in the article, and it’s one of those cases where I can read the headline, read the article, and wonder why I spent my time reading it.
- moberemk 3mo agoThank you! I immediately had the same reaction and was disappointed no one else pointed it out, though I'm guessing it's because most people just read the headline before commenting
- usrbinbash 3mo ago> Proceeds to list but a handful of remotely meaningful repos I'm pretty sure, shortly after the motorized vehicle was made commercialy available, there were only a "handful of remotely meaningful" people and companies who stopped using horses. Do tell: How many horses are around on todays streets?
- woodruffw 3mo agoThis is not an effective argument, given that these smaller services are uniformly retrograde in functionality.
- subarctic 3mo agoAgreed, if there was something actually better to switch to then I'd be interested. But seems unlikely for that to happen now - it's easier than ever to build a new github, at least the app itself but i doubt someone's gonna bother with the business effort needed to actually build it up as a reliable, trustworthy option that you know will be around for a while, which is a process that takes years when you know you're going to get disrupted. It would probably have to be open source to get early adopters to use it but somehow be nicer to use than GitHub, and there's basically no money to be made
- bigfishrunning 3mo agoIf only Github was reliable and trustworthy, we wouldn't be having this discussion.
- drdexebtjl 3mo agoWhen cars started replacing horses, they didn’t have more features. They just didn’t get sick or temperamental, and they didn’t shit all over the streets.
- woodruffw 3mo agoGoing more than 20 miles an hour and not dying of heat exhaustion (or because your oats are too dry) are pretty big features. But my point was that it’s a bad analogy. People are opting out of GitHub despite the alternatives having fewer features. You can read that as an ideological choice or as a YAGNI one. If it’s ideological, then there’s no competitive or feature angle at all; people are doing it because it seems right to them. (To be clear, I have no problem with this. I think GitHub only gets better after public pressure, as we’ve seen with the last N cycles of product atrophy.)
- latexr 3mo agoA better alternative might be along the lines of “why developers ditch GitHub for Codeberg and self-hosting alternatives”. That way it doesn’t commit to a trend or exaggerate the situation in your mind, instead making it clear it’s a report on “those X who do Y do it for these reasons”.
- wallaBBB 3mo agoAgree with the headline part, but the second part not so much. As someone mentioned it's about the trend. I have heard from people at multiple major open source projects that what is keeping them at Github at this point are free GH Action credits that they get and they couldn't really afford CI/CD if they left. Meaning numbers would be bigger if GH wasn't "paying" projects to stay.
- jorisw 3mo agoThe trend may be there but the article does nothing to back that up
- groundzeros2015 3mo agoIt’s just a PR article to promote alternative
- asnelt 3mo agoGiven the context, I had to read this twice to understand that PR is not referring to Pull Request here.
- metacritic12 3mo agoIf I didn't know any better, I would think this is a thinly veiled marketing piece by "Codeberg", a company that I never heard of until this headline. https://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html https://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- maleldil 3mo agoCodeberg is a non-profit. They only host public FOSS projects. I don't think they're looking for marketing.
- CupricTea 3mo agoI can't help but think at this point that Ghostty's "departure" from GitHub is unserious. It's been two and a half months now and not even a single peep of discussion about where they may be migrating to or what they may be doing.
- gbacon 3mo agoGitHub is still the only option on their download page: https://ghostty.org/download https://ghostty.org/download